1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to computer systems and electronic mail. More specifically, the present invention relates to a method and an apparatus for replacing an attachment to an email message with a reference to a location where the attachment is stored.
2. Related Art
The advent of computer networks has led to an explosion in the development of applications that facilitate rapid dissemination of information. In particular, electronic mail is becoming the predominant method for communicating textual and other non-voice information. Using electronic mail, it is just as easy to send a message to a recipient on another continent as it is to send a message to a recipient within the same building. Furthermore, an electronic mail message typically takes only a few minutes to arrive, instead of the days it takes for conventional mail to snake its way along roads and through airports.
Electronic mail messages commonly include attachments, which are typically files containing documents, or other types of data, that accompany the email message. However, using email attachments can give rise to a number of problems. (1) Attachments can create a burden for an email system. If an email message with a large attachment is sent to a large number of people (for example a baby picture sent to all 30,000 people in a company), the process of sending the attachment will take up a large amount of network bandwidth. Also, storing the attachment in a large number of mailboxes will take up a large amount of storage space. Furthermore, messages containing attachments may persist in mailboxes for a large period of time because people are not always diligent about reading and deleting email messages. (2) A user may accidentally forward an attachment. This is particularly a problem if the attachment contains confidential information that was not intended to be forwarded. (3) It is hard to control access to an attached file because anyone who receives a copy of the file can do anything they want with it. (4) Once a file is sent in an email, it is hard to subsequently update the file. It is possible to send a follow-on email, but this process is cumbersome. Furthermore, if the recipient makes changes to the file, it is hard to merge these changes back into the original file.
One method for overcoming these problems is to make the file accessible at a location on a server, and to send an address of the location, such as a uniform resource locator (URL), in the email message instead of the file. If this solution is combined with an access control/revision mechanism, it can potentially solve the above-listed problems.
However, this solution is cumbersome for a user who sends a file. Making a file available on a server requires a significant amount of effort to manually copy the file to the server, and to configure the server to make the file accessible over a communication channel. Furthermore, end users typically do not have permission to perform these operations, and establishing access/revision controls can be complicated.
What is needed is a method and an apparatus that automatically makes email attachments available on a server without requiring the attachments to be manually copied and configured on the server.